A Year Without George Michael, My First Queer Hero

By Estlin McPhee

December 25, 2017

"He was the first real living human that I knew of who was gay."

Last Christmas, I marched into the living room and announced, “George Michael is dead!” like the drama queen I become when I’m returned to my family dynamics, as if I was expecting to incite some kind of riot. Instead, the house at large turned to me, said, “Who?” and then went back to their chocolate eating and holiday reading.

Being home for the holidays in Fort Langley — a small town in British Columbia’s Bible Belt where I was raised in an evangelical Christian household — is already always hard; I am the solitary queer in a big family whose get-togethers still involve comments on my flamboyant hairstyle. But the news of George Michael’s death elicited an extra layer of sadness in me, intensified by an already-present sense of isolation. The only thing I could think to do was shrug on my coat and pat down all the pockets, as if whatever had gone missing in that moment could be easily found again. The scale of everything felt off; I wasn’t sure if I’d misplaced my keys or something much more melodramatic, like my heart. I just knew something was lost.

I left my family to their sugar and took my feelings out for a walk in the fading light, where I found myself wandering over to my old high school. No one else was outside in the snow globe of my old life, lit softly by strings of Christmas lights from nearby houses. I crunched over the frozen field toward the low outcrop of buildings that were once my whole world and let myself walk all the way around the school grounds for no real reason. I kept from slipping by holding onto the chain-link fence next to the theatre I used to perform in as a hopeful gay adolescent. I blended into the weather nicely by crying in a quiet, subdued way. It was almost cinematic — me in the snow with these tears over a loss that managed to be both abstract and permeating. The soundtrack should be obvious.

The next day, I packed up my emotional baggage and took the bus back home to Vancouver. And in the following days, then weeks, I went for more walks, mostly around the iced-over gardens and slushed-up city streets of my neighborhood. It was cold enough that the steel of the single right earring I always wear felt like a shard of ice that had dropped down my collar. There was snow everywhere and the world was quiet and still as a result. All that hush gave me a lot of time and space to think through why I was feeling so affected by the death of a pop star I never knew.

I still feel more than a little overwrought fessing up to my abundant tears, which luckily I think George Michael would have appreciated. He knew how to dance back and forth between the saccharine and the sparse, sometimes even touching on the profound. That fine balance is what I love best about pop music when it’s done well — and it was always done well with George Michael.

In this past year, other people have written better about the context and impact of his long list of well-known songs; I just want to talk about one song in particular — his duet with Aretha Franklin, “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me),” which came out in 1987, the year I was born. Unlike the vast majority of his stellar repertoire, George Michael didn’t write “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me).” But he sings it like he’s spreading the good news, which feels appropriate since the sound pulls heavily from gospel music. When I hear that song, I travel straight back to my ten-year-old self. Right after George and Aretha proclaim, When the valley was low / it didn’t stop me / I knew you were waiting / I knew you were waiting for me, a little voice wells up inside of me as if to shout aloud, “Yes, I was waiting! I was waiting this whole time. For you.” I was primed to respond to saviors in this exact way since birth, so I can’t help it.

Truthfully, I was waiting for someone, for a long time. And as a kid, that someone turned out to be George Michael. There’s a lot to be said for the kind of queer hero he was, from his unapologetic celebration of his sexuality to his artistic accomplishments to his political and charitable work, as well as his ability to reinvent, reimagine, and restyle his life every time the world and his own self asked that of him. I appreciate all those things and more. But even without all that he would have been a hero to me for one simple reason: he was the first real living human that I knew of who was gay.

Photo by Michael Putland

When I was growing up and through my teens, I didn’t have family, friends, community members, or neighbors who were out to me. I didn’t have much access to secular media. In my house, cross-bedazzled jewelry was a sincere shout-out to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not a badass fashion statement. I had no concept of queerness. When I was ten, all I had was the opposite of a careless whisper — an intentional scream, maybe — of gossip about George Michael: he was gay, he had been caught in a humiliating scandal, and was both a weird laughingstock and vaguely threatening as a result.

What a classic queer skill, to be a joke and a cultural menace simultaneously. At that point in my life, I hadn’t heard any of George Michael’s music or even seen his picture. All I knew was that he was gay — with the arrest to prove it — and that while I lived many, many miles from wherever he happened to be gaily frolicking and destroying the moral fabric of the universe, I was always going to remember his name.

Somehow, the vulnerability of showing off who I am makes me feel safer
to be that self.

Years later, when I was fifteen, stumbling my way into a trans and queer identity without any of the right words to describe my gender or sexuality, I did know that aesthetics could help communicate where language failed or wasn’t yet available to you. I raided my older brother’s closet and went shopping in the boys’ section at Value Village. I made questionable choices in short-sleeve button-ups. And I spent a long time wavering back and forth on which side to wear my earring on, as I read contradicting arguments for which was "the gay side."

I wasn’t even really thinking about George Michael at that time. I didn’t have to. His name was so thoroughly associated with queerness in my mind and his single earring so iconic that it was immediately obvious to me what my coded embellishment would be — though I went for the hoop. I already had a set of those at home. All I had to do was leave one in its little velvet case and slide the other into my ear. Instant gay — at least to myself, which was perhaps the main objective all along.

I’ve worn that single earring on and off for the better part of fifteen years now, with no plans to stop any time soon. It’s the first thing I put on in the morning when I get dressed. I don’t take it off at night until I’m ready to drop interference between myself and the world. Over time, my earring has become a kind of talisman, a tiny amulet of my own queerness that I can carry with me, which reminds me who I am no matter where I am. I wear it purposefully when I go places where it’s harder to be queer, like my hometown. It’s paradoxical armor — my earring both exposes and protects me. Somehow, the vulnerability of showing off who I am makes me feel safer to be that self.

In the uncertain, isolating time — before we find queer community, friends, lovers, and family — we need heroes. Somebody’s got to be out there, showing us that there’s possibility. Somebody’s got to be rooting for us. Eventually I found ample support and kinship in friends, mentors, and community. I built a strong, diverse network of queer complexity that cradles me to this day and continues to evolve. But there was a time before that beautiful spider web, when I looked for heroes around every corner and mostly didn’t find them.

I never had to look for George Michael — he shook his ass right into my life with audacity and style. Even when I was more alarmed than emboldened by his presence in the world, I could hear it in his voice. He was always rooting for me, irreverently preaching in “An Easier Affair,” a song I’ve had on repeat since his death: Don’t let them use my life to put your future down / Don’t let them tell you that happiness can’t be found.

I like to envision a world in which future queers have no recollection of the first gay person to storm into their lives because those lives are so full of incredible homos from the very start that it would be impossible to single out just one. I don't live in that world but I believe it’s an amazing possibility. God knows that us queers are geniuses at alchemy. We’ve got that uncanny ability to turn steel into gold, with just a little bit of faith.

Estlin McPhee is a writer and collective organizer on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land in Vancouver. They work with youth and live with cats.